Sri Lanka Insurance Corporation Life (SLIC Life) is drawing on six decades of market presence as it modernises for a new phase of growth. In 2025, the company’s Life Fund stood at Rs247 billion, with total assets of Rs275 billion, supported by a network of 142 branches, 94 agency Business Development Centers, and an agency force of 4,000.
SLIC Life was incorporated on 1 February 2024, in line with regulatory requirements for composite insurers to hold their life and general insurance businesses as distinct legal entities. SLIC Life is part of the state-owned Sri Lanka Insurance Corporation.
Following the segregation, Nalin Subasinghe, the company’s Chief Executive Officer, says SLIC Life has focused on refining its growth strategy, accelerating digital transformation, and embedding a more customer-centric approach across the business, while continuing to strengthen its competitive position as a Treasury-owned entity under the Ministry of Finance.
A strategy laid a top five pillars
Subasinghe organises his strategy around five priorities: growth, digital transformation, customer experience, staff culture, and profitability. The plan runs on a one-to-three-year cycle rather than a longer horizon. As a state-owned enterprise (SOE), SLIC Life must submit an annual corporate plan to the Ministry of Finance and report progress every quarter, a discipline he says suits an insurance market that shifts too fast for five-year plans.
The growth pillar focuses on broadening SLIC Life’s market reach through a multi-channel distribution strategy. While strengthening the agency force through recruitment, capability development, and a refreshed operating structure remains a priority, the company is also expanding its bancassurance and group life businesses, while pursuing new opportunities in areas such as microinsurance and overseas markets. Subasinghe says strengthening each of these channels will enable the company to serve a wider range of customer segments and support sustainable long-term growth. The fourth pillar, which Subasinghe describes as people centricity rather than human resources, reflects the company’s belief that lasting transformation begins with its people. With policyholders remaining with the company for an average of 15 years, he says customer expectations naturally evolve over time. Building a customer-centric culture is therefore about ensuring employees continuously adapt alongside those changing expectations, delivering a more responsive and personalised experience at every stage of the customer journey.
The fifth pillar is profitability. SLIC Life is a limited liability company owned by a holding company that answers to the Treasury, and it is expected to deliver a return on equity like any commercial insurer.
“To remain at the forefront of the industry, we continuously benchmark ourselves against the best in the market,” Subasinghe comments. “The pillars I’ve described ensure innovation and service quality are aligned with these benchmarks.”
New systems for a new era
SLIC Life operates in a market where the life insurance landscape continues to evolve and the majority of private insurers focus exclusively on life insurance and are structured around it. Subasinghe describes the immediate priority as upgrading core systems, a project he expects to shape the company’s digital capability for the next five to six years.
Digital transformation at SLIC Life extends beyond customer-facing initiatives to the way the organisation operates. The company has been redesigning core business processes, introducing greater automation, strengthening data visibility, and equipping management with real-time insights to support faster, more informed decision-making. Subasinghe says these initiatives are helping build a more agile organisation that is better positioned to respond to evolving business and customer needs.
A dedicated data science division, set up in 2025, sits inside the company’s information technology function. While Subasinghe describes it as early-stage, he says the priority is on data quality rather than analytical capability: ensuring the company holds clean, granular data that is easy to access before building predictive tools on top of it. SLIC Life has also set up what it calls digital centres of excellence, teams that review internal processes to identify where automation or better data use could help. “Success comes from having the right people within the organisation to lead change and embed it into the way we work,” he says.
Furthermore, the transformation extends across the organisation’s internal operations. SLIC Life is progressively digitising workflows across human resources, procurement, facilities management, and other corporate functions, creating a more integrated and efficient operating environment while enhancing the employee experience. At the advisory level, digital tools now provide agents with real-time visibility into their business performance, enabling them to track customer engagements, referrals, and policy conversions, while providing regional managers with timely performance insights through integrated dashboards.
Onboarding for a new generation
One of the most visible outcomes of SLIC Life’s digital transformation is the customer onboarding journey. The company’s digitally enabled advisory force can complete policy applications electronically, allowing proposals to move seamlessly through underwriting within the same digital ecosystem. The introduction of e-proposals and e-policies has further streamlined the process while reducing paper usage, with policy documents delivered digitally by default. To strengthen authentication, SLIC Life also incorporates video verification during the digital policy acceptance process, an additional safeguard that Subasinghe says distinguishes the company from common market practice.
On the customer-facing side, SLIC Life continues to improve its Customer app, with a single login now showing all of a customer’s policies, replacing a system that previously required customers to call the company to add each policy separately. The company released two app updates in June alone, part of an ongoing effort to refine the customer experience. Special features have also been enabled to let customers request changes or update their accounts directly through the app instead of visiting a branch or contacting head office. The company also collects Net Promoter Score and customer satisfaction data automatically after service interactions, including claims.
Keeping the human touch
Subasinghe is clear that digitisation has a ceiling in life insurance, and draws a distinction with motor cover. Motor insurance is bought out of legal or practical necessity, he says, which makes it suited to online comparison and purchase. Life insurance is not, as customers rarely recognise the need on their own, and an adviser typically has to explain what happens to a family’s finances if something happens to the policyholder before a savings goal is met. He expects this advisory relationship to persist even as the company digitises other parts of its operations, though he expects the nature of the interaction to keep changing.
“Retirement planning itself, he argues, is becoming more necessary as Sri Lankan family structures shift away from multigenerational support, a change he compares to patterns already established in other societies. He contrasts this with an older pattern, in which parents put savings towards a child’s wedding or education on the expectation that the child would look after them in old age, reducing the need for a separate retirement fund.”
He also points to generational change in how decisions get made. Customers now in their twenties and thirties, he says, take insurance decisions faster than customers did a decade ago, and are less inclined to spend extended time in conversation with an adviser. He does not think this calls for new products so much as a faster, better-supported sales process, since SLIC Life already offers products spanning the customer lifecycle from childhood policies through to retirement products.
Retirement planning itself, he argues, is becoming more necessary as Sri Lankan family structures shift away from multi-generational support, a change he compares to patterns already established in other societies. He contrasts this with an older pattern, in which parents put savings towards a child’s wedding or education on the expectation that the child would look after them in old age, reducing the need for a separate retirement fund.
That expectation, he says, no longer holds as reliable, which shifts the burden of retirement funding, and often a child’s university costs as well, back onto the individual. He expects this to widen demand for the company’s savings and retirement products over time, though he is cautious about the pace of that shift given how closely knit Sri Lankan families remain relative to Western peers.
Rewards and what comes next
Beyond digital transformation, SLIC Life is also enhancing the way it builds long-term customer relationships by revisiting its customer loyalty programme, which currently combines merchant partnerships with a scholarship scheme run under its corporate social responsibility programme. Subasinghe wants to fold this into a broader personalised service model, comparable to the personal banking services offered by commercial banks, rather than treating rewards as a standalone perk. The plan is to roll this out over two-to-three year periods.
“The market won’t stay the same,” he explains. “It will be different three years from now, and so will the customer.”
Taken together, the changes point to a company building the systems and speed of a private insurer, without giving up the advisory relationship Subasinghe argues remains central to selling life insurance in Sri Lanka. Six decades of reach, he suggests, is not a legacy to protect but an asset to modernise, one that can deepen trust with existing customers while winning over a new generation.